Trumping Tropes with Joke(r)s: The Daily Show “Plays the Race Card”

Abstract

The race card is at once a trope and a topic that reductively prefigures racial meaning and performance. As a trope, it frames most racial discourse as a cheat or violation and thus prevents deliberation over material realities of race. As a topic, it exists as a resource for diminishing the social and political significance of persistent racial problems. We argue that The Daily Show with Jon Stewart (TDS) deploys political humor as a troping device that disrupts the contradictory logics of race card rhetoric and disorders a range of reductive commonplaces and figures of racial discourses. Specifically, we maintain that TDS pushes the boundaries of everyday negotiations of race, performs alternative conventions, and models manners of thinking, speaking, and acting useful for contemporary understandings of race. This essay therefore enhances the contemporary body of scholarship on politics and humor while expanding upon analyses of the rhetoricity of race and race relations.

Keywords:

• Political Humor
• Race And Racism
• Race Card
• The Daily Show
• Tropes

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank Bob Ivie, Robert Terill, the anonymous reviewers, and Bill Eadie for their feedback and encouragement on earlier drafts of this manuscript.

Notes

Race has long been a prominent topic of discussion in TDS: from a mockumentary entitled, “RACE: The Afrospanicindioasianization of America” in 2006 through an investigative report entitled, “Bird Like Me,” on environmental racism in Mississippi in 2011, and much more.

On July 16, 2009, police responded to a 9-1-1 call indicating burglary when a passerby witnessed Gates “breaking in” to his Cambridge home after he forgot his keys. His exchange with responding officers resulted in an arrest for disorderly conduct, and the incident quickly garnered accusations of racial profiling. Sergeant James Crowley, the arresting officer, denied such accusations, his precinct issued a statement of regret (though Crowley refused to apologize), and the charges on Gates were dropped.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Christopher J. Gilbert

Christopher J. Gilbert is a doctoral student in the Department of Communication and Culture at Indiana University, Bloomington.

Jonathan P. Rossing

Jonathan P. Rossing (PhD, Indiana University) is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication Studies at Indiana University Purdue University, Indianapolis.